Taylah is a PhD Candidate in the Cardiac Cellular Systems Laboratory having been granted a La Trobe University — Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute Joint Scholarship in 2019 under the supervision of Dr Alex Pinto, Prof Grant Drummond and Prof Chris Sobey. Taylah’s project focussed on understanding how adipose tissue (fat) changes in the context of type-2 diabetes. Taylah used single-cell and nucleus RNA sequencing paired with tissue clearing, immunofluorescence staining and high-resolution imaging. This work has highlighted key cellular and molecular drivers of adipose tissue dysfunction in a diseased state and sex differences that exist in mice with and without diabetes. In 2020, Taylah was granted a competitive RhD Student Grant from the Defence Science Institute at Melbourne University to support her through her studies. Moreover, she was later awarded the Bakers prestigious Rod Andrews Award for the best student presentation at the institute’s internal symposium. Most recently, Taylah received the ECR Basic Science Award, and Runner-up and People’s Choice Awards for oral presentations at the 2022 International Congress on Obesity and the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand Annual Scientific Meeting, respectively.

Previously, Taylah completed a Bachelor of Science at La Trobe University in 2017 where she majored in Genetics and Microbiology. Following this, she completed an Honours year (2018) in Microbiology within a molecular parasitology laboratory working with malaria parasites.